“Well, then,” answered François, “you should not mind a little thing like a bullet, which will send you to heaven.”
“True,” said the old man, suddenly straightening himself up; “your words are words of wisdom.”
“Now,” continued François, ranging himself by the side of the old priest as the sombre procession marched two and two down the stone stairs, “I have a great deal to answer for in the next half hour, but, I tell you, I believe God is a good deal easier on His poor children than men are to each other. The devil is a sans culotte. I chummed with him, but I never mistook him for a gentleman.”
“Really,” said the old priest as he clumped feebly down the stairs worn by the feet of many prisoners, “you do for me what I should do for you.”
The grewsome procession, headed and flanked and enclosed by guards and jailers, passed through the courtyard until they came to a garden. On one side was a long, lately opened trench.
Around them, afar off, was a gigantic circle of leaping flames. Over them hung the greatest smoke bank the world ever saw, while the stench of powder and blood polluted the soft May air. The place was full of National Guards, many of them drunk, all of them bewildered, stunned, and terrified by the cordon of fire and steel that was tightening around them every hour. But they were murdering to the last.
When the procession was halted, and the prisoners were stood up against the stone wall of the garden, the officer in command was the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel. He grinned when he saw François.
“Here you are,” he said. “Come now, before we spoil your beauty, give us a song and dance.”
“My regular price for a performance,” said François, “is five hundred francs, and you probably have not that much about you. Besides, although, like you, my Marquis Egmont of the Holy Angels, I have not lived as a gentleman, unlike you, I mean to die as a gentleman.”
“Forward!” cried Egmont to the firing squad, which marched out and took their places.